Tiger-Torn Jeans

Here's your nightly math! Just 5 quick minutes of number fun for kids and parents at home. Read a cool fun fact, followed by math riddles at different levels so everyone can jump in. Your kids will love you for it.

Tiger-Torn Jeans

Jeans are just blue denim cloth with some pockets sewn on. But at the Kamine Zoo in Japan, animals have helped MAKE jeans. The zoo took big rubber tires — a favorite toy of big animals like lions and bears — and wrapped them up in blue denim. Then they let the animals claw and chew away at them. Tigers tended to work alone; bears worked in pairs, and lions piled on in groups. When they were done chewing and scratching, the zookeepers rescued the torn, shredded cloth and sewed it into jeans. They sold the jeans to make money for the zoo. As you see in this video, the claw marks make you look like you rolled around in the lion’s den yourself!

Wee ones: If lions, tigers and bears worked on these jeans, how many types of animals helped?

Little kids: If a tiger, 2 bears and 3 lions all helped shred the jeans, how many animals is that? Bonus: If each one used only its 2 front paws, how many paws got into the act?

Big kids: If you have 8-foot-long pieces of chewed-up denim, how many pieces would stretch 48 feet if laid end to end? Bonus: If 1 tiger-torn pair cost 120,000 yen (Japanese money), and 1 yen equals about 1 US penny (1/100 of a dollar), for how much did those jeans sell in dollars?

The sky’s the limit: If people will buy a lion pair of jeans for $2,700, a bear pair for $3,600, and a tiger pair for a price exactly halfway between, how much does a tiger pair sell for?

Answers:Wee ones: 3 types of animals.

Little kids: 6 animals. Bonus: 12 paws.

Big kids: 6 pieces. Bonus: About $1200.

The sky’s the limit: For $3,150.

About the Author

Laura Bilodeau Overdeck is founder and president of Bedtime Math Foundation. Her goal is to make math as playful for kids as it was for her when she was a child. Her mom had Laura baking while still in diapers, and her dad had her using power tools at a very unsafe age, measuring lengths, widths and angles in the process. Armed with this early love of numbers, Laura went on to get a BA in astrophysics from Princeton University, and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business; she continues to star-gaze today. Laura’s other interests include her three lively children, chocolate, extreme vehicles, and Lego Mindstorms.